Busy-ness

In addition to helping me unload some of my hard-earned and keeping the world's postal services in action, etsy has stirred my creative juices markedly.

One of the first projects I did was to make this "Taggie". I'd seen a few 'taggies' on etsy and thought that it looked super easy. It is. For those of you who don't know, it's a ...thing... with lots of little tags hanging off for the baby to feel. Now Patrick loves the tags on some of his toys better than the toys themselves, so I thought this would be worthwhile.

It's a macrophage (a bacteria and debris-eating white blood cell); I tried hard to think of something that naturally has things hanging off and came up with a cell with receptors. And macrophages have lots of pseudopodia (reachy-outy bits) so it would make an interesting shape. I also put an empty cereal packet bag in between the layers of fabric for 'crackliness'. I embroidered on some organelles- there's a nucleus with clumped nuclear chromatin, some endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondriae, golgi bodies, lysosomes, ribosomes and a gram-positive coccus (let's just call it a Streptococcus) being ingested in a phagosome.
And Patrick loves it. Yay!

This is the fabulous polished cotton I just bought off etsy to turn into a fab summer frock. I'm now going through the vintage paper patterns to find a suitable style...
This was the mess that confronted me the other day: my first day off in a while. We had been re-painting our bedroom, so we had been sleeping in my study, and hence all my papers, letters and work stuff just got piled on my desk without sorting. It took me an hour just to get all the crap into sorted piles before i could even think about what to do with it all. (Don't worry, MMG, that urine speci pot has Milton's in it for my breast pump @work.)


This doesn't really relate to the rest of the post, but this is Patrick out 'riding high' in our Macpac baby pack. Note how my hair is at handy 'grabbing distance'. Yay.